About Us

Penmar Industries was created by James Penders and Phillip Marchese circa 1964 in NY and moved to Norwalk, CT in 1967. Both Jim and Phil were consummate sales executives in the packaging industry with a very strong customer base and clear vision of how they wanted to grow and add value to their customers. At the time, they believed that by joining forces they would be in a much stronger position to serve their extensive customer base. And so, Penmar Industries was created to serve customers in the packaging industry across the northeast.

Shortly after creating Penmar, Jim and Phil along with several other associates in the same industry, wanted to develop their own line of pressure sensitive tapes to compete with the likes of 3M, Intertape, Shurtape among many others. They were all very familiar with the industry and had been selling these types of tapes for many years. They felt that by creating their own brand not only would they be more customer focused, but would also be able to provide better quality and on time delivery. As such, our brand named SpecTape was born and the group built a converting facility in Erlanger, KY to serve all the various partners across the US. To this day, SpecTape is one of the preeminent tape brands in the US serving customer nationally and around the world.

Looking to always move Penmar into a more value-add porting of our customers supply chain, and with the understanding that we must continue to reinvent our company and value proposition for our customers, it was decided that we should venture into the pressure sensitive label manufacturing business. Thus, during the 1990’s we purchased our first flexo printing press to serve customers in the custom-made short-run label industry. Since that time we have added several other printing presses and technologies that enable Penmar to continually expand our product portfolio and value-add proposition to our customers.

Over the years, we have built a legacy of exceeding customer expectations for quality products, reliable service and providing solutions for challenging problems. This has always been and continues to be one of Penmar Industries’ chief sources of pride and competitive advantage. It has been this commitment to excellence that has earned us recognition as a leading minority supplier of quality labels, tapes and packaging supplies during the past 50 years.

Today we have relocated the company to a new facility in Stratford, CT. Our new organic strategy requires Penmar to expand our footprint not only by the square footage of the building that manufactures our labels, but also by the number and nature of markets we serve. Over the course of the next 5 years we will implement the accelerated growth portion of our strategy to effectively triple the size of the company in that timeframe. This is a very exciting time for all of our Penmar customers and employees. It is our goal to achieve our growth strategy seamlessly and transparent to all our customers. The only impact our customers should feel is the improved reliability and sustainability of Penmar industries products and services at a better cost.